Tag Archives: manliness

~ Dowager Countess of Grantham, played by the illustrious Maggie Smith

I actually don’t believe in dealbreakers. This may surprise you, since I can be pretty brutal on this blog, but, let’s face it, in reality, when I truly fancy someone, he can do no wrong. He could sleep in a bunny suit and worship a clay statue of a muppet as the one true god, and it’s highly likely that I’d find it endearing if I like the guy enough.

Matching tracksuit – This is doubly repulsive if the tracksuit is white. (Yes, Joey, I’m talking to YOU.)

Gold chain necklaces – I shudder at the thought.

Flat-bill baseball caps – I’m a bit of a baseball cap snob. I once dated a guy just because I liked his perfectly worn, fitted baseball cap. I never let him take it off. Ever.

The deep V-neck – Call me old-fashioned, but I find it more than a little disconcerting when a man sports more cleavage and a more plunging neckline than myself. My barely-there-boobies really take it personally.

A significant portion of my dealbreakers consists of items related to man-jewelry. I can safely say that I am generally opposed to almost all forms of man-jewelry. Accessorize cautiously, lads. Very very cautiously.

Merci buckets to Julia, who is the inspiration for this post/rant. She is a phenomenal lady who manages to bring all the boys to the yard while dressed in a fabulous shiny flame-retardant lizard suit, and I admire her greatly.

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Long-time readers and twitter friends are well-acquainted with my obsession with man-buttocks (for example, see Mr. Beautiful Bottom). So it was only a matter of time before I passed judgment on the D.C. derriere.

Ladies, if you’re like me, and one of your time-consuming hobbies is admiring a snappy suit on a man, I advise you to take the metro line 1 out to La Défense on weekday mornings.

I used to work out there a few years ago, and I swear to you, the ONLY thing that made rush hour commute bearable was the fact that you could get up close and personal with some of the most impeccable suiting on the planet.

They’re not all sporting Zegna, but they don’t need to. The suits are well-tailored, are cut to show off all my favorite man-parts, and, in short, are glorious to behold.

Defined man-shoulders.

V-shaped man-torsos.

And, of course, a nicely framed man-butt.

These are not to be confused with boy-shoulders, boy-torsos, and boy-butts. I have absolutely no love for the skinny-ass coat-hanger sculpture with no meat or muscle on him. No lady wants something to poke her eye out whilst cuddling.

That being said, the skinny TIE, on the other hand…

I am a fan.

In my humble opinion, a man needs a perfectly-tailored jacket to pull off the skinny tie, and I am happy to report that there is a pleasant proliferation of nicely pulled-off skinny ties on the line 1.

The take-home message here is this:

I like the parisian suit.

However, that does NOT mean that I have to like the parisian IN the suit.

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Every first Sunday of the month, museums all over Paris open their doors, free of charge, to the public. And on one such Sunday at the Louvre, I was checking out the decorative arts section when I noticed that the one other guy in the room with me was kind of cute.

I thought no more of him until I realized, five rooms later, that he was still there.

I decided that I would not be creeped out and that I’d give him the benefit of the doubt since he was “kind of cute”. (Yes, I know, I’m superficial and I’m okay with it.)

However, I wanted to make sure that he was following ME, and not just following the prescribed route through the ceramics section and reading the captions in the tapestry rooms at the exact same rate as me.

So I decided to conduct a test.

I abruptly left the Objets d’Art section, went up several escalators, and traversed the length of the wing to get to the French Paintings section. When I checked behind me, he was still there!

Yay! He totally digs me. I wasn’t imagining things!

But then I thought to myself, why hasn’t he made a move?

Pansy-ass french man.

He eventually ran out of time, since the museum staff herded the crowds out the door at closing time. No surprise, but we “magically” ended up in the same metro train car.

Yet he still hadn’t sacked up to chat me up.

I was fed up with his pansy-ass pansiness, so I decided to be ballsy.

I wrote my number on the back of my ballet ticket from the night before, and I handed it to him as I was getting out at my stop. I blasted him with my most winning smile and pranced away — my heart beating wildly from the adrenaline rush of doing something so ballsy.

Now you’re probably thinking, this story sounds like a fantastic when-we-first-met story that happily married couples have.

Yeah. Right. Come on, stuff like that doesn’t happen in the world of Manshopping in Paris.

Things went awry when we arranged a date. It was the date the launched my illustrious full-time career of painful dating in Paris.

He had this high-pitched voice and barely-above-a-whisper mumble, which I found unbearable and impossible to understand. But most importantly, his personality was just flat. If I stared long enough, I could swear that he was actually one-dimensional.

My boredom was so severe that I’m scared that it may have caused some brain hemorrhaging at the time.

The worst of it was that I couldn’t seem to get out of the date! He managed to cling to me all the way from the restaurant to my door (it was a 40 minute walk!), and the whole experience was very unpleasant, to put it mildly.

The next day I told him that it wasn’t going to work for us romantically. In other words, I told him to bugger off and leave me alone.

And a normal guy would have, right?

But of course, I’m incapable of finding a normal parisian man to date.

He wouldn’t stop asking me out.

He asked me out to dinner to introduce me to his friends.

He asked me to accompany him to work functions.

Three months later, when he moved to India, he sent me weekly updates and demanded to know why I wasn’t responding.

Every once in a while, some ballsy guy who comes across my blog will work up the nerve to ask me, whom some have called the Man-chopper, to go out with him. At first, my policy could be summed up with: “Why the hell not?” I figured, worst case scenario, I’ll have blog-worthy material, so this could be a fun exercise.

But ever since the big box of crazy that was Mr. Hostility, I’ve had to revise this approach.

It all started out harmlessly enough. Mr. Hostility read my blog, emailed me to ask me out for a drink, and I agreed. In retrospect, I should have found it odd that even though he wrote, “I just read a few of your blog entries,” he didn’t compliment my blog in any way, nor did he tell me that he found my blog hilarious.

Let’s face it. I AM hilarious. I am obviously vain. And the least that any reader can do is acknowledge these facts of life and stroke my ego a bit before asking me out.

That definitely should have been a red flag, but I was so young and naïve then.

So I met him for a drink.

Mr. Hostility vs. standard No. 2 pencil

Strike 1

The guy looked like a stick insect. Except skinnier. I remember thinking that the width of his leg was disturbingly comparable to my arm. The illustration to the right is an accurate, to-scale representation of his skinniness vs. the thickness of an actual pencil.

Strike 2

The guy smoked what appeared to be a whole packet of cigarettes… in less than two hours. It’s one thing if he had smoked a couple throughout the entirety of the date, but, as a non-smoker, this excessive smoking just didn’t sit well with me.

Strike 3

The guy was as dull as… Good god, he was so dull that I can’t even think of anything that could come close to being as dull as him. He lacked a sense of humor, to the extent that he — brace yourself, folks — took my blog seriously. Hand to God, the guy told me that he didn’t really enjoy my blog and criticized me about some its finer social points, to which he took great offense. Basically, the Man-shopping train left the station, arrived on the other side of the continent, and left Mr. Hostility standing on the platform with his trousers around his ankles.

I tweeted an abbreviated version of these three strikes that evening when I got home.

The next day, during my lunchtime gym session, I received the following text from him while I was on the treadmill:

Sticky insect is your mother, you fat, repulsive Asian cow.

I laughed so hard that I nearly fell off the treadmill. It was such a close call that I haven’t been on a treadmill since.

His reaction was so out of proportion to everything that I thought that it was a joke. An hilarious joke. But then I remembered that Mr. Hostility didn’t know how to joke.

So I realized, wow, this man may be a little unhinged.

I mean, come on. He knew that he was asking out a blogger. He knew that he was potential blog fodder. He knew how merciless I can be. Transparency was never an issue, as my dating life, personality and, dare I say, scathing wit, are here on the internet for all to see.

Yet he clearly thought that he was so spectacularly awesome that he would have been THE ONE with whom I would fall madly in love and abandon my man-chomping ways.

So Mr. Hostility clearly didn’t take it so well that, in less than 140 characters, I managed to sum up everything that displeased me about him. Frankly, for those of you who witnessed that tweet, you can probably attest to the fact that it really was the nicest that I’ve ever been to any of my dates. 140 characters doesn’t give me much room to be truly bitchy.

What a big baby.

Oops. I mean, what a skinny baby.

Skinny, hostile baby.

I said it then, and I’ll say it again…

… Next!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

P.S. Big shout-out to my buddy, Alex, who found a MacPaint program for me to play with. We have Alex to thank for the rock-tastic drawing skills showcased in the above representation of Mr. Hostility. If all goes well, I hope to be showing you more of my unparalleled artisitic talent in the future.

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Even though I have made a conscious choice to take a break from dating, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have crushes. I firmly believe that crushes are essential to a woman’s survival. Without them, I would probably wander around in public in my pyjamas, relegate showering to the category of unnecessary luxuries, and permanently lose my eyebrow tweezers. In my eyes, if it ever comes to that, I might as well be dead.

So in order to maintain a healthy emotional state, as well as a presentable public persona, I try to have at least several crushes at any given time. Currently, I have three….

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Mr. Tall Dark Delicious

He is tall. He is dark. He is positively delicious. He is like a cross between Lenny Kravitz, Vin Diesel and a Greek god. And lord, did I mention that he is TALL?? I’m not necessarily into really tall guys, but he’s just so tall that I’m fascinated by the novelty of it. Especially since I live in Paris and don’t often see such hearty, broad-shouldered specimens of manhood. There is just SO much of him! So. Much. Man.

He also rocks these great running shoes with bright yellow accents. I’m a simple creature sometimes, drawn to bright colors and shiny objects. His shoes, as well as his entire hotness, is just so shiny.

The man is so gorgeous that I can’t even fathom interacting with him on any normal human level. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if he were to talk to me, his voice could not be heard by us mere mortals. To us, the less godly-beautiful, it would just sound like thunder and fury.

Besides, we all know that such absurdly beautiful gods have almost no chance of having any measurable personality or sense of humor.

Right. That’s what I’m going to tell myself.

Mr. Justin Long

The real Justin Long is the love of my life. He and Drew Barrymore don’t know it yet, but I am going to marry him.

So since I laid eyes on this Justin Long lookalike, I haven’t stopped drooling.

And even though he is a wispy wisp of a Frenchman whose ass is approximately the size of my fist, I’ve been drooling for approximately four months now. (That, people, is the kind of power that the real Justin Long has over me.)

The problem is, I’m drooling so consistently and so profusely that it has clearly blocked all high level brain functions in his presence. Walking AND breathing at the same time? Forget about it. Stringing together complete sentences AND avoiding moving obstacles? So far, no success.

He is just so adorable that I can’t contain myself. It’s shameful.

To avoid humiliation, I just flee whenever I see him.

Mr. Chicken Legs

Okay, so his legs obviously aren’t very impressive, but who cares? I think that it’s endearing that his legs are skinny. I’m not saying that he’s a wispy willow-twig-boy. Despite his skinny legs, the man is in great physical shape and his legs are stronger than they look.

One problem: he is the ringleader of my rockclimbing group. And we all know that we shouldn’t shit where we eat. I do not want to lose a climbing partner to stupid crush shenanigans.

So alas, I’m just going to pretend that I’m his platonic climbing buddy and attempt to belay him safely while staring at his ass (which is a decent size and very perky!).

Clearly, this is not going to end well.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What is that old saying? ‘Variety is the spice of life’? Well, that’s bollocks. Crushes are the spice of life. ESPECIALLY if they never lead to anything. Honestly, the moment that a crush from afar transitions into some tangible romantical entanglement, all the fun is lost. All the suspense, the fantasy, the shininess…. Blown to bits by the unforgiving reality of his douche-toolery.

Winter is coming to Paris, the skies are getting greyer, and the outfits are getting greyer. But I refuse to allow my mood to get any greyer.

So even as I say ‘Next!’, my crushes will keep me sane and smiling.

Next!

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A couple of weeks ago, the illustrious and infamous Fishy of Plenty More Fish Out of Water published a brilliant little piece about the top five things that he looks out for on his first dates. It was positively inspiring.

So in honor of Fishy’s work, I’ve decided to compile my own list.

After almost five months of countless first dates and one second date, I’m finally able to pinpoint five major issues that I look out for on a parisian first date…

(1) Are my arms bigger than his legs?

Another variation of this question is: Can I bench-press him?

It wasn’t until I moved to Paris that this was ever an issue.

I don’t know what it is about the life here that it makes the men so… slight. Could it be the diet? Could it be that the women here are so tyrannically bitchy that they literally reduce their men into tiny little slivers of manhood leftovers?

And while Mr. Almost There was the closest I’ve ever come to a decent first date, he was a victim of severe munchkinosis, which could be to blame for his insecurities and for the patronizing asstardedness that he displayed on our second date.

Yes, I went on two dates with him. I had to prove to myself that height wasn’t a deal-breaker for me.

As it turns out, it is a dealbreaker. At least in Paris, anyway.

Am I superficial and utterly without substance?

Abso-fucking-lutely.

(3) Is his COCKtail actually a COOCHtail?

Just because “cocktail” has the word “cock” in it, by no means does that make it acceptable for a grown man to order one on a date.

For the same reason that a lady shouldn’t break out her big buckets of crazy all at once, a man shouldn’t sabotage his chances of seeing a lady’s naked woman-bits by ordering glow-in-the-dark girly drinks.

Obvious, right?

Not in Paris.

ALL my dates, including all my speed-dates, have ordered ridiculous frilly concoctions. (There was even a drink whose glass was fitted with a tiny light fixture that changed the color of the drink every ten seconds.) Mr. Love-You-Long-Time really blew it when he ordered his Hello Kitty coochtail and belittled my beer-drinking ways.

Asstard.

(4) Is he capable of talking about something OTHER than my asian-ness?

Yes. I’m Asian.

Of all people, I’m the last person who needs to be reminded of this fact.

I especially don’t want to be reminded by some pasty creep who doesn’t know his asian from his arse.

As I’ve discussed before, I have nothing against the Asian fetish. It’s something that I can use to my advantage in today’s cutthroat dating marketplace.

By “run away,” I don’t mean that I made my polite excuses and parted ways amicably but quickly.

I literally ran away.

Mr. Cheshire Cat was the incarnation of all my most terrifying childhood nightmares, and I bolted after drinking only a quarter of my pint. Mr. Ten Minute Wonder was the shortest date in my entire dating history (and no, it wasn’t a speed date!); I backed out so quickly that I lost a glove, which I’m still very upset about. And Mr. Crazy had me sprinting through metro doors as they closed, at which point I got stuck and had to get pulled through by the other passengers.

As far as I’m concerned, as long as a guy doesn’t make my digestive system run in reverse, and as long as he doesn’t force me to run in heels, it’s a good start to our relationship.

************************

So as far as standards go, mine have plummeted since I started this dating experiment.

Like this:

In all fairness, the date wasn’t catastrophically bad, not like all the other Misters that I’ve blogged about.

But then again, it wasn’t great either. Our interaction was abysmally awkward — the conversational equivalent of trying to pull out a tooth with a line of string attached to a doorknob. But the most unsettling aspect of this date:

He had ordered the most ABSURD drink on the menu.

Yes, I am a judgmental bitcherina. Fine, I admit that. But seriously, people, this was some artificial Hello Kitty color, came in a giant tippy martini/margarita glass, and it had pink straws and some sort of tropical fruit garnish to complement its apple liqueur base. It also had ludicrous name: “The Love-You-Long-Time.”

We’ll ignore the latent issues with the drink name. It pales in comparison with the substantive matter at hand: the cultural drinking divide between men and women in Paris.

Why do Parisian men order girly cocktails? Mr. Love-You-Long-Time said that they tasted “divine.” Another Frenchman friend confessed that he hated the taste of beer because it didn’t have the nuanced flavors of wine (I protest!). But the more interesting question is what the women here are expected to drink.

My Irish flatmate was wondering whether it would seem “normal” if she ordered a pint on her upcoming drinks date. I found absolutely nothing wrong with that, since I always order a pint myself. Another Americano and an Irishman later backed me up on this, insisting that beer-drinking broads are awesome.

However, our French man-friend begged to differ, insisting that a Frenchman would consider a pint-drinking gal to be pretty strange. Apparently, Parisian girls never order pints. In fact, they rarely order beer at all. Perhaps they consider themselves too sophisticated for beer? When they do opt for a beer for whatever reason, they would only order a half-pint. And I bet that they hate every plebeian sip of it.

While I wholeheartedly disagree with this anti-pint bias, perhaps it has contributed to my inability to land a second date…

Mr. Love-You-Long-Time actually had the audacity to point out my beer-drinking ways on the date, all the while guzzling his frosted, sugary concoction. After I mentioned that my flatmates are both Irish, he glanced over at my pint and mumbled, “Well, THAT explains why you drink beer.”

Like this:

This is basically a real-life tutorial for how NOT to ask a girl out. Seriously, guys, don’t ever do this. If you do, this Man-shopper will don her Dating Crusader cape and pink lycra bodysuit, come find you, and bitch-slap you until you get it right.

Mr. Incompetent: “So we should grab a drink sometime.”

Me: “Sure, that sounds good.”

Mr. Incompetent: “We can go any time you want.”

Me: “Uhhh, next week maybe?”

Mr. Incompetent: “Yeah, sure.”

<a long pause as I wait for him to start putting in some real effort…>

Me: “Ummm ok, how about Wednesday?”

Mr. Incompetent: “OK.”

<another long pause while I contemplate how to achieve world peace…>

Me: “OK. Well. I finish work at seven, so I leave it up to you to choose time and place.”

Mr. Incompetent: “No problem, pretty girl.”

<gag>

Mr. Incompetent: “So where would you like to go?”

What a twit.

There was only positive thing that came out of this train-wreck of a conversation. While he was scrambling around looking for his balls, I managed to work out all the world’s problems in my head.

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About me

I'm a twenty-something American woman who tried to make sense of dating and romance in Paris -- or the lack thereof. The Frenchmen were products on the shelf, and I was a shopaholic. But the social experiment continues in D.C., now that I'm back in the USA and on the prowl for new (American) toys to play with!